It is easy to think of Members of Congress as corrupt, this is particularly true of the Republicans who seem hell bent on doing everything they can to go against what polls show time and again is the will of the people. Since they are the avowed party of business and they have so many multi-millionaires and billionaires in their ranks the circumstantial evidence is pretty strongly in favor of this idea.
However the Dog would like to offer an alternate theory; namely that a large percentage of Congressional Republicans are not evil or corrupt, they are merely sack-of-hammers-dumb. Call it the creeping Jethro Bodine-ism of the Republican Party.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
It is a dirty little secret that we don’t like to talk about, but there is no really requirement for being intelligent and being a Senator or a Congressman. Sure, we love to think that the voters of this nation will make an informed decision and not elect an obvious fool to one of the most powerful offices of our nation, but the evidence just does not support that wish.
In some ways, what you have to do to be elected in our modern system actually selects against the truly smart. Campaigning, for candidates and for the most part consists of saying the same thing, the same way over and over and over and over and over. There is the basic stump speech, there is the basic door knock spiel and there is the basic fund raising pitch. For months on end this is most of a what a candidate will say. That is not something that most very smart people find interesting or desirable to do.
The smart ones who are elected do it because they know it is the way to get to where their thoughts and words can make a difference. However, that does not prevent those who are not so smart from doing it as well, the difference comes when it is time for them to do that actual job as opposed to the job of campaigning. This where we get our Jethros in Congress.
Think back the old Beverly Hill Billy’s show and you will see what I mean. Jethro was the completely gormless backwoods cousin Jed Calmpet brought with them to California. He was enthusiastic about everything, even though he was the complete and total package in terms of cluelessness. This allowed him to say and do the dumbest things with complete sincerity. It was never his fault that things fell apart, he did not have a mean bone in his body, he just went where he was told and did what he was told was the right thing.
This is the problem with far too many Republicans in the House and Senate. They are members of the CPAC training, which was about looking good, raising money and parroting the talking points of the leadership. This was the brain child of Newt Gingrich and it worked as long as there was a core of smart (and lets face it, corrupt and evil) leadership in the Republican Party.
Where things started to go bad for the Republicans is when the corruption got to the point where people like Newt and Tom DeLay and other Republican Revolution leaders were shamed out of Congress. This left the Republicans in the position of moving some of their Jethros up to leadership positions. This is how the frightfully orange John Boehner becomes the Minority Leader. A man so gormless that after a day of listening to substanitive back and forth about health care thinks it is okay and effective to repeat the stale and discredited Republican talking points. Or Minority Whip Eric Cantor who brought enough binders to make himself a little fort at the health care summit and proceeded to hide behind it.
It is how we are treated to things like Republican budget proposals, without any numbers in them. This is not to say that all Republicans are mentally challenged, far from it, some, like Minority Leader McConnell is clearly just bought and paid for. He will say whatever his owners want him to say, he does not pretend that he believes it, it does not matter.
That brings us to folks like Rep. Michele Bachmann. She says some of the most heinous and destructive things imaginable, telling her constituents she is their reporter behind the lines; that they should not fill out their census form (even though if they follow her advice her congressional district is likely to disappear); she has also been an enthusiastic pusher of the death panel meme. The thing is I do not believe any of these ideas are hers, she has just been loaded up with talking points from the various Republican think tanks and goes out and spouts them.
It is this outsourcing of thinking which is the most probable cause of Bodine-ism. Chris Mathews is right about one thing (even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while) politics should be a learning profession, if you are going to practice it you should be learning and thinking all the time. Republicans are more than content to let the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation or Federalist Society do their thinking for them, they just have to read the cliff notes. As my grandfather said (on numerous occasions) if you let someone else do your thinking for you, that is when you wind up cleaning the stables.
Is there a solution for this? No, not short of the Republicans coming to the conclusion that they need to stop having fools in their party who think the Internet is a series of tubes, or that a snow-storm in the winter in on the East Coast is somehow evidence against global warming. The sad fact is that the nation has a large share of Jethro’s in the population and as long as they are happy to be gormless and uninformed there will be room in Congress for those who think that Medicare is not a government run health care program.
In the end it is just enough to recognize that it is likely that many of those we think of as evil and corrupt are more likely to be dumb. There is some benefit in this, if we stop treating them as though they have well thought out and principled opposition we can start to use our own smart guys to run circles around them and get more of our agenda done. All it takes is elected a few Jane Hathaway’s to clean up the Jethro’s messes.
The floor is yours.
